The following description is provided to assist the understanding of the reader. None of the information provided or references cited is admitted to be prior art.
Deduplication (or dedup) is a type of data compression technique to reduce duplicate copies of repeating data. Data chunks are compared with unique chunks of data, and when there is a match, the duplicate data is deduped. When data is deduped, an entry is generally created in metadata (e.g., in a metadata map) with a reference to the deduped data that points to the corresponding unique chunks of data. In some deduplication systems, dedup chunks may be at a fixed length. In this case, some of the data chunks may have duplicate data that could have been deduped at a much larger chunk level, but instead, are deduped into the smaller fixed lengths. Accordingly, metadata and fragmented data may increase, resulting in degraded performance.